If you are tired of hacking together commands at the terminal or having to open a giant bloated IDE just to perform search and replace across a number of files, then Regexxer is the tool for you.

Reader Sergio turned us on to this great application geared towards programmers, but it could be useful for any hard-core geek, especially since it’s a nice little standalone package.

Installation for Debian/Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install regexxer

The great thing about this utility is that you can step through and confirm whether to replace or skip for each file that is found. Just enter your regular expression or keyword into the search box and hit the Find button.

The application will find the first file and show you the suggested change in the small textbox below, and you can choose to replace or hit the arrows to go to the next file.

The only thing that this app is really seriously lacking is the ability to save searches for later use. It’s no PowerGrep, but it’s free and open source.

Visit regexxer homepage at SourceForge